How much is your computer’s processing time worth? Pornsupercomputer on the right track.

Sounds like I missed a great DemoCamp Victoria last night. Despite continued and heavy lobbying to get me there to take pictures, I just couldn’t do it. I don’t think I would have had a great time either since my tooth wasn’t feeling great. But I digress.

Reading Yule’s coverage from last night this idea for a “pornsupercomputer” caught my attention:

Ok, next up was Will Whittaker, who offered two possible demos, from which the crowd chose Pornsupercomputer.  Ok, I did not fully understand this, and it wasn’t because of the porn.  In fact, the porn (and traffic) was the part I did understand — and SETI, too, for that matter.  Will’s presentation started with a slide showing the text “My computer is bigger than yours.”  Uh-huh.  Turns out he had three obsessions or interests that kept the brain gears turning: porn sites and the tremendous amount of traffic they draw; the fact that google adwords or adsense is forbidden on porn sites; and the fact that SETI uses other individual computers for its own computing needs (i.e., SETI “uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.”)  And Will had this brainstorm that it would be really cool if he could somehow mash these three aspects together — hence the Pornsupercomputer concept was born.  He would pay porn sites to install a widget that would run on the porn site visitor’s computer every time s/he visited.  This widget would provide computing power to the supercomputer, which exists virtually.  That’s sort of how I understood it, but it got pretty technical in the Q&A. Source: » DemoCamp Victoria 02 another success Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

No, not because of the porn part—okay maybe at first glance—but the idea of selling your computer’s processing time and bandwidth has some serious merit I think.

Yes, SETI@home and Folding@home have both been asking us to donate our “spare” cycles to them for years, but what if there was a way to earn money doing it? I have a PS3 (with 9 cores baby) that sits unused pretty much all the time, what if my bandwidth and processing power could be rented out?

Will’s idea to sell something to porn sites to then harness visitor’s machines later, well that doesn’t sound too kosher to me. You have to ask, or it’s called spyware. However, on the other hand…

We all have some pretty smokin’ machines now, what if when you stepped away for lunch or a meeting you earned a few cents per min for your processor?

I’d do it. Yes, there would have to be tight, tight controls. I’d want to be able to shut it off or throttle back as I needed, however isn’t this the next real step in cloud computing?

The altruistic ventures of donating your drive space, etc for the common good haven’t faired to weel.  Yes, torrent downloads are different, but those aren’t really altruistic are they?

I don’t think something like this would work for backups or other mission critical applications, but for something where just a few bits and bytes need crunching it would work.

So, next question, how to do it and approach it?

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Tagged as: cloud computing, shared processing